What a dramatic title for this post! Let’s be honest. I didn’t use facebook that much to begin with. But this post is about life after Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and to a partial extent YouTube as well. I am letting go of Web 2.0.

But Why?

I am letting go of my “Web 2.0” social media and moving on to more decentralized things like my own hosted blog and Mastodon for several reasons.

Our Attention is More Valuable than Our Money

In this economy where you scroll is worth far more than money you pay out directly. That is why so few major players offer subscriptions and prefer you take “free” ad supported tiers.

I could probably write diatribes on this but there are dozens of books on the topic like “Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World”, “Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!”, “Subprime Attention Crisis”, “Stolen Focus”, “The Sirens’ Call”, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” and on and on and on who will explain it all so much better than I.

The important takeaway is that people are referring to the current tech industry as “The Attention Economy” for a reason. Companies are using relentless testing and neuroscience to keep you engaged. Pages and content are ranked by how long you look at it before clicking or swiping away.

I Spend Intentionally

My father loves the phrase “follow the money.” You gotta follow the money to understand where people’s true allegiances and motivations lie. I’ve always like to think about it the other way around and prefer the adage “Vote with your Dollars.”

Combining the prior point with intentional spending means the websites and content that I look at, are the ones I support.Meta, X, and even TikTok have done a hard right push to put all of their support behind Trump and his political desires very openly. Since those decisions don’t align with mine I want to support other companies with my time.

It’s All Much Worse for Us Than We Admit

Most of us know how toxic social media has become. I don’t personally know anybody who doesn’t complain about whatever platform they are on or how toxic it all is in general. I believe that we all know how problematic is but we are too addicted to pull away.

I have come to liken social media to cigarettes. We know they are bad for us too, we even know they are addictive. But even after the entire public came to know this everybody kept smoking for years and years and years before it finally became a lot less socially acceptable.

There are so many books and so many studies about how toxic the dopamine feeds are for our brains. There is so much research about how it feeds us just the right (or wrong) content to keep our neurons activated, our phone screens on, and the fingers scrolling.

I am pretty sure that in another 15 years or so we will hit better social awareness that social media companies are the tobacco outfits of the 10-20’s and the majority of the public will have moved on.

Ok, So What Next?

Rediscovering the new ways and old ways of staying connected to people. I am still on Mastodon, but I have removed all social media and other things from my phone to make it a device I put things into and use for direct contact, not a consumer of media.

Connect Directly Where I Can

I am used to being connected to so many people so easily and keeping track of them all in chats is hard. I have a lil app on my phone now that reminds me the last time I saw somebody, like a micro CRM so I remember to send pings to people. I plan on making a self hosted version of this sometime soon.

Find a New Way to Host Communities

I am also looking into how to replace Facebook’s biggest superpower to local communities; Groups and Events. I think if Facebook hadn’t done this so well it would already be long in the dust for most queer communities. In fact many of my friends who have stayed on Facebook have done so solely because they would loose access to community.

If the answer is we are bringing back forums I am in. I ran forums about 10 years of my life I can go right back to running community and events in them. I am more interested in something more “Fediverse” but honestly I’m not overly invested to the idea.

Curated Ingestion of Content

I have been an RSS person since Google Reader first became a thing and I never let go of it even when it closed. For the longest time I have been a huge fan of the paid web app NewsBlur but now that I am not getting all my various news and articles from social media I am working even more to curate lots of various feeds and sources to bring me all the news and entertainment I want.

Switching to a locally hosted FreshRSS has allowed me to add a lot more feeds without getting overwhelmed because it has some very powerful per feed and global filters. I added intitle:Trump to my global “mark as read” filter has reduced a lot of content from all my local and queer news sources and focused them back on the things I want to read right now. I can even add Youtube channels I want to follow to get only their latest videos, no shorts, no recommended thumbnails, just my content creators.

I am an even bigger podcast person these days as well. I prefer shorter daily and weekly news based podcasts and issues analysis with professionals over longer “talking heads share their thoughts.” I listen to all of my podcasts at 2x speed and I still listened to anywhere from 300 to 400 hours of podcasts a year depending.

Sharing without Instant Feedback

Finally, as you can see here. I am putting more energy into my blog. The nature of the content might start changing and evolving. I might finally clear out the many years of posts I don’t really like anymore and put some shorter content here too. I will never add likes or comments back to my blog. This is my space to share what I want, and people are welcome to contact me directly if they want to engage with me and my content. I have no scripts or analytics on this so it is what it is and I don’t fuss about how popular it is.

Want to Help?

If you have read this far and have ideas on how to do groups and communities better I am all ears. Or if you want to tell me about your favorite feeds or podcasts I am open to that too.

Click my socials or linktree in the sidebar to get in touch.